Update from Website Jaga (June 2009)

Dear friends,
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When I first started this blog in January 2009, the goal was to try to see how many of our old mates in the three St Joe Form 5 classes of 1976 I could reach, and to attempt to rebuild the community we had - first in cyberspace, and hopefully through a series of mini-reunions, build up towards a grand physical reunion. It is now almost 6 months since the project began, and I thought it would be good to share the modest progress we've made together on this journey.
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Take a look at the following chart, which gives a snapshot of where we are (as far as I can ascertain).
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Allow me to explain how I came up with the chart. I've been keeping track of who we have connected with through this blog. This would include former classmates who have made comments on the blog or who have sent me emails, and also a few who have told me they have accessed the blog but not "said" anything (why so shy lah :-)
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So this is indicated by the blue bar, for each of the classes as well as a consolidated one. In other words, we have reached 25 of the members of Five Science, 4 of Five Arts1 and 8 in Five Arts2. Of course this is just an approximation, as there may be others who have accessed but never said anything or told me. These numbers also do not include the increasing numbers of people from other years than 1976, classmates who left prior to Form 5, as well as from various sister schools ... many of whom have been active in the blog conversations and made it even more interesting. I hope they continue to participate actively and spread the word to others as well.
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Then there is a very slim purple bar, which sadly indicates those in our cohort who have passed on - two in Five Science, two in Five Arts 1, none (as far as I know) in Five Arts 2.
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And the yellow bar indicates the total numbers of students in each of the classes.
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So you can see that we have reached 54% of Five Science, 11% of Five Arts 1 and 21% of Five Arts 2. Taking all three classes as a whole, we have reached 30% of the entire cohort, or 37 old boys.
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I'd say this is a reasonable number - it is, after all, numerically almost one whole class. It is a small achievement, considering that most of us have separated for 33 years and many of us are dotted all over the world.
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However I think we can do better, and I'd like to urge each of you to take a look at the lists of names of our classmates in the early January postings (i.e. "Who were in Form 5 Science? 5 Arts 1? 5 Arts 2?") . You can probably recognise those who are already active visitors of this site and I have (for most of them) also indicated their email id's too. If each of you can try to contact a couple of people who are NOT on yet, pass them the website address and encourage them to take a look and better still drop a comment or two, I think we'll be able to expand our community even further.
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Finally, thanks for all your active participation, your contribution of news , info and photos ... do keep it up. We are almost reaching 30,000 visits when I last checked! I will try to post interesting material to keep the buzz going. By all means, send me suggestions on what you want to see, call up your other friends and together let's try to hit 60% of our cohort before the end of 2009.
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Have a good weekend & best wishes
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--- James aka Jimmy aka Website Jaga
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